Published in Medieval and Early Modern
English Studies Volume 12 No. 2 (December 2004) pages 393 - 418.

393

When
Chaucer¡¯s work is viewed in a wider literary context, it is most often first
explored in terms of the works he is known to have read, his direct ¡®sources,¡¯
the works which he translated or adapted. Now Chaucer does not inform his
audience that Troilus and Criseyde (henceforth referred to as Troilus)
is an adaptation of a lengthy narrative poem by Boccaccio, Il Filostrato,
or that the Knight¡¯s Tale is a radically shortened version of parts of
Boccaccio¡¯s Teseida; whereas the narrator of the Clerk¡¯s Tale
informs the pilgrims at the start that his tale is adapted from a Latin prose
tale by Petrarch (we do not know if Chaucer realized that Petrarch was adapting
the final story in Boccaccio¡¯s Decameron). As far as Troilus is
concerned, although scholars have long known of and discussed its origin in
Boccaccio¡¯s text, it was only in 1984 that Barry Windeatt made available an
edition in which Chaucer¡¯s text was placed face-to-face with Boccaccio¡¯s so
that readers could easily compare the two narratives in detail.

394

At its most primitive, the
source-centered approach does little more than establish a list of points in
which any particular ¡®source¡¯ is followed or not by the Chaucerian version.
However, an awareness of the changes an author has made to what was found in a
direct source is obviously an essential tool in establishing the specific
identity of a literary work which is based on a previous model. Windeatt was
the first to make a really detailed study of the characteristic features of
Chaucer¡¯s reworking of Boccaccio, establishing clearly that he was following a
very different set of literary and philosophical questions. The main points of
relationship are concisely enumerated by him in his 1992 volume devoted to Troilus
and Criseyde in the Oxford Guides, pages 50-72.

Everyone knows that Chaucer translated
Boethius¡¯s Consolatio Philosophiae and included thematic echoes as well
as directly paraphrased passages from it as he explored its themes in a number
of his works, especially Troilus and The Knight¡¯s Tale. Chaucer¡¯s
familiarity with the Consolation is mentioned by every scholar who
writes about Troilus; the first full-length general study dates from
1917, B. L. Jefferson¡¯s Chaucer and the ¡®Consolation of Philosophy¡¯ of
Boethius, and thereafter it becomes a commonplace. Concerning the Boethian
elements in Troilus, the 1951 study by Theodore A. Stroud remains a
standard reference for that work, and the main points of relationship were
concisely enumerated by Barry Windeatt in his volume in the Oxford Guides,
pages 96-109.

While the
connections between Chaucer and the literary works serving as his immediate
sources are now familiar, more complex, indirect and hidden references to other
writers are less easily recognized. This is particularly true of the echoes of
Dante that scholars have identified at certain points in his rewriting of
Boccaccio¡¯s Filostrato as Troilus and Criseyde. This may in part
be because, while the way in which Chaucer uses Dante¡¯s Commedia shows a
quite remarkable depth of understanding, many scholars of Chaucer in recent
decades have not had an equivalent familiarity with Dante¡¯s work. It is all the
more striking that Chaucer nowhere in Troilus

395

refers to
Dante¡¯s Commedia explicitly. It remains a secret, private subtext,
providing depths and complexities of meaning to Troilus that have only
recently begun to be recognized.

The
topic was initially discussed by Morton W. Bloomfield, in a PMLA article
¡°Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde¡± (1957). Richard
Neuse begins his essay ¡°Troilus and Criseyde: Another Dantean Reading¡±
(Shoaf 1992 199-210) with a list of previous studies that refers to Monica
MacAlpine¡¯s The Genre of Troilus and Criseyde (1978), R. A. Shoaf¡¯s Dante,
Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word (1983), Winthrop Wetherbee¡¯s Chaucer
and the Poets (1984), and Karla Taylor¡¯s Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy
(1989). Other major studies of Chaucer¡¯s knowledge of Dante include those by J.
A. W. Bennett, ¡°Chaucer, Dante and Boccaccio,¡± and by Piero Boitani, ¡°What
Dante meant to Chaucer,¡± both in Boitani¡¯s 1983 collection of studies on Chaucer
and the Italian Trecento, and pages 125 – 137 of Barry Windeatt¡¯s 1992 Troilus
and Criseyde in the Oxford Guides to Chaucer. In 1997, David Wallace
opened his Chaucerian Polity with a lengthy chapter on ¡°Chaucer in
Florence and Lombardy,¡± which studies mainly social and political issues.
Finally, Winthrop Wetherbee¡¯s 1998 essay ¡°Dante and the Poetics of Troilus
and Criseyde,¡± a radical revision of the last chapter of his 1984 Chaucer
and the Poets, is the most recent and perhaps the most insightful
discussion of Dante¡¯s relationship to Chaucer¡¯s Troilus so far
published.

Windeatt (1992,
126-7) provides a list of over 30 points in Troilus and Criseyde where
Chaucer is clearly translating directly from Dante¡¯s Commedia. At the
same time, all the critics named above agree that Chaucer owes Dante much more
than mere details. In his article on Chaucer for the Dante Encyclopedia
(160-2), Winthrop Wetherbee suggests that in Troilus,

a historically
localized story of earthly love is played out against the background of the
spiritual journey of the Commedia. The relationship is of course largely
parodic: though the idealistic lover Troilus has much

396

of the buono
ardor of Dante¡¯s pilgrim, Criseyde is an all-too-worldly Beatrice –
emmeshed in desire, politics, and history—and Pandarus, the guide who leads
Troilus to the ¡®hevene blisse¡¯ of sexual union, is a cynical and
self-interested Virgil.

It might seem
at first sight impossible to prove that Chaucer was conscious of these precise
ironic parallels. It is clear, however, that the references to Dante found
throughout the poem are sufficiently numerous and deliberate to show that
Chaucer had an amazingly profound knowledge of the Commedia and was constantly
recalling it as he was writing his version of Boccaccio¡¯s story.

The depth of
Chaucer¡¯s knowledge of Dante¡¯s Commedia and the complexity of his
references to it becomes clear from the very first lines of the poem.

The double sorwe of Troilus to
tellen,

That was the king
Priamus sone of Troye,

In lovinge, how his
aventures fellen

Fro woe to wele, and
after out of joie,

My purpos is, er that I parte fro
ye.

Thesiphone, thou help
me for t'endite

These woful vers, that
wepen as I write.

These lines seem self-explanatory, and in
one sense they are. Yet, in view of what we shall see in the following pages,
it cannot be mere coincidence that the words ¡®double sorwe¡¯ echo lines in
Dante¡¯s Purgatorio (22.55-6) where Virgil uses the phrase ¡®le crude armi
/ della doppia tristizia di Iocasta¡¯ (the cruel arms / of the double sorrow of
Jocasta) as a summary of the contents of Statius¡¯s Thebaid. He is
formulating a question in which he asks Statius how he can reconcile the pagan
darkness of his epic with the Christian faith he has just revealed he held in
secret. One fundamental theme

397

of Chaucer¡¯s work, like Dante¡¯s, is the
problematic continuity between pagan and Christian writing; another is the
question of how much pessimism a writer can have without despairing of both
humanity and literature.

On
the other hand, Chaucer may very well not have realized when he was writing
¡®double sorwe¡¯ that Dante was probably consciously echoing an expression found
in St. Augustine¡¯s Confessions, where Augustine says he ¡®lamented his
mother¡¯s death with a duplicia tristitia¡¯ (Patterson 132 note 118)
because he was deeply tormented at her death—sad because she was dead and sad
not to be able to rejoice at her salvation as he thought a Christian should.
For Chaucer, the doubly hidden reference to Statius¡¯s Thebaid would have
been sufficient. As Patterson, says, Troilus is ¡®massively saturated
with Thebanness¡¯ (131) and Chaucer uses versions of the term ¡®double sorrow¡¯
several times in his ¡°Theban¡± works, but nowhere else in his writing (Patterson
132 note 118).

In
the following lines of the opening stanza quoted above, Troilus is given a
double literary dimension. First, he is Priam¡¯s son, therefore destined to be a
heroic warrior as brother of the better known Hector, linked by blood and his
very name to the tale of the sorrowful end of Troy; second, he is to be seen
experiencing joys and sorrows in loving as the main male character of a heroic,
chivalric romance. That may be what Chaucer¡¯s ¡®double sorrow¡¯ refers to, or it
may be explicated by the pattern of his love story that is summarized in the
next line: ¡®Fro woe to wele, and after out of joie.¡¯ In this lapidary summary
of the familiar Boethian pattern of Fortune¡¯s wheel turning there is also a
double sorrow, that which comes before and after joy. The theme of the
impermanence of human happiness, so lightly introduced here, can be considered
to lie at the very core of the poem. Wetherbee points out that everyone knows
how short-lived human happiness is, and everyone always forgets it, including
Troilus and the narrator of his story; history is a tragic story that
constantly repeats itself ¡ª ¡®the Theban legend (is) Chaucer¡¯s chosen model of the fatally
repetitive character of secular history¡¯ (1998, 253).

In
closing the first stanza, Chaucer invokes Tisiphone to be his inspiring

398

spirit. The reader needs first to recall
that Tisiphone is not a classical muse but one of the furies, the dreadful
keeper of Tartarus, the place of torment, glimpsed by Aeneas during his journey
to the infernal regions in Book 6 of Virgil¡¯s Aeneid. Boccaccio (in his
commentary on the Inferno) and other commentators interpret the name
Tisiphone to mean ¡®voice of anger¡¯ or ¡®evil speech,¡¯ which is hardly what we
expect to find inspiring a love story. Chaucer must also have known that in the
opening lines of Statius¡¯s Thebaid, this same Tisiphone is summoned from
Hell by blind Oedipus and sent to make his sons mad at the start of the action
that leads to disaster. In this way, the first stanza of Troilus opens
and closes with hidden references to Statius¡¯s Thebaid.

The Furies also
have their role in Dante, although Tisiphone is given no separate role there.
Dante and Virgil are threatened by the three Furies in Inferno 9, in a
passage that stresses their malevolent, hellish nature. Remorse, despair and
darkness are suggested by these parallels, and recalled by the line in the next
stanza where Chaucer establishes a parallel between himself as weeping narrator
and the Fury: ¡®Thou cruel Furie, sorwing ever in peyne.¡¯ Why, after all, should
the narrator of a love story, even a sad one, weep as he writes the opening
lines? Pity, perhaps, would be a reason. But why then would he suggest a
parallel with the infernal sorrows (see Wetherbee 1998 266 note 13) of a
tormenting Fury? Discussing this question, Wetherbee (1998 250) affirms that
¡®In both the Troilus and Dante¡¯s Commedia the influence of this
¡®infernal¡¯ vision, dominated by the sense of individual tragedy and historical
fatalism, coexists with an idealizing poetics of love.¡¯ We are made aware by
this of the delicate nature of the responsibilities facing a story¡¯s narrator,
and of the risk that a narrator too may misread the tale he is telling. It is
dangerously true, as the proverb says, that ¡®All the world loves a lover¡¯ for
not all lovers should be loved, and excessive love of tales about loving can
lead, as Paolo and Francesca know, to Hell.

Chaucer¡¯s
dialogue with Dante is far more subtle than his more familiar dialogue with
Boethius, and it is rarely discussed in part because the

399

¡®Boethian¡¯
language of Fortune, freedom and necessity is so much simpler to spot. Yet even
when he mentions such ¡®Boethian¡¯ topics as the theme of Fortune, Chaucer should
not be too quickly assumed to be referring directly to Boethius. Before him,
Dante had undertaken his own thoughtful re-reading of Boethius¡¯ Consolation
in the light of Augustine and Aquinas (see: Dante Encyclopedia 405:
¡®Fortune¡¯). Editors have already noted, as J.A.W. Bennett points out (Boitani
1983 99), an echo of Dante in Troilus (Book 5.1541-7) in a passage which
is concerned with defining the role of Fortune in the loss of joy:

ffortune -- which that permutacioun

Of thynges hath, as it is hire comitted

Thorough purueyaunce and disposicioun

Of heighe Ioue, as regnes shal be flitted

ffro folk in folk or when they shal be
smytted –

Gan pulle away the fetheres brighte of
Troie

ffro day to day til they ben bare of ioie.

This passage
clearly contains echoes from a major passage in Dante¡¯s Inferno
(7.61-96), where Virgil instructs Dante on the relationship between Fortune and
material fortunes (i.e. worldly wealth):

Who made the heavens and who gave
them guides

was He whose wisdom transcends
everything;

75that every part may shine unto the other,

He had the light apportioned
equally;

similarly, for wordly splendors, He

78ordained a general minister and guide

to shift, from time to time,
those empty goods

from nation unto nation, clan to
clan,

81in ways that human reason can't prevent;

just so, one people rules, one
languishes,

400

obeying the decision she has given,

84which, like a serpent in the grass, is hidden. (Trans. Allen
Mandelbaum)

The
most important lines in Italian, which Chaucer drew on and echoes directly,
are:

It
may or may not be a coincidence that Chaucer, after having stressed like Dante
(and Virgil in the Aeneid) that Fortune is not always mere ¡®blind
chance¡¯ but ultimately proves to be a source of blessing and is subject to the
will of ¡®high Jove,¡¯ says that the fall of Troy was the work of Fortune. For
that is what Dante says explicitly in Inferno 30:

E quando la fortuna volse in basso

l'altezza de' Troian che tutto ardiva,

15sì che 'nsieme col regno il re fu casso

The
presence of Dante in this passage of Chaucer¡¯s may be still more

401

complex. As Bennett remarks, Dante always
makes a clear distinction between ¡®Giove,¡¯ used in naming the pagan god and the
planet Jupiter, and ¡®sommo Giove,¡¯ designating the Christian God. In Purgatorio
6.118 Dante refers to ¡®sommo Giove che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso¡¯ (you,
high Jove who were crucified here on earth for us). Likewise, there is no other
passage in Troilus in which the name of Jove is qualified with ¡®high¡¯
and no other where the name Jove is clearly used to refer to the Christian God.
Chaucer, with his strong interest in Boethius, must have been particularly
struck by Virgil¡¯s teaching about Fortune in Inferno 7, for he also
echoes it in adapting the Knight¡¯s Tale (1663-6):

The destinee, ministre general,

That executeth in the world over al

The purveiaunce that God hath seyn biforn,

So strong it is . . .

Another
clear echo of Dante in Troilus, that (like the one just discussed) has
no parallel in Boccaccio¡¯s text, is particularly intriguing. Near the center of
the poem, in Book 3, at the climax of the poem¡¯s love tale, as Troilus finds
himself in bed with a willing Criseyde, he bursts into a hymn of praise to
Love: ¡®O Loue, O Charite¡¯ (3.1254) that includes a stanza meditating on Love¡¯s
generosity:

Benigne Love,
thou holy bond of thinges,

Who-so wol
grace, and list thee nought honouren,

Lo, his
desyr wol flee with-outen winges.

For,
noldestow of bountee hem socouren

1265That serven best and most alwey
labouren,

Yet were
al lost, that dar I wel seyn, certes,

But-if thy grace passed our
desertes. (3.1261-67)

402

What is challenging and troubling is the
fact that, after opening with a strongly Boethian notion (cf. Chaucer¡¯s
translation Boece 2.metrum 8 ¡®al this accordaunce and ordenaunce
of thynges is bounde with love, that governeth erthe and see and hath also
commandement to the hevene¡¯) this stanza includes slight but certain echoes
from the highest spiritual climax of Dante¡¯s Commedia, the prayer
addressed to the Virgin Mary by St. Bernard in Paradiso 33.13-21:

Donna, se' tanto grande e tanto vali,

che qual vuol grazia e a te non ricorre,

sua disïanza vuol volar sanz'ali.

La tua benignità non pur soccorre

a chi domanda, ma molte fïate

liberamente al dimandar precorre.

In te misericordia, in te pietate,

in te magnificenza, in te s'aduna

quantunque in creatura è di bontate.

(Lady,you are so high, you can so
intercede,

that he who would have grace but does not
seek

your aid, may long to fly but has no wings.

Your loving-kindness does not only answer

the one who asks, but it is often ready

to answer freely long before the asking.

In you compassion is, in you is pity,

in you is generosity, in you

is every goodness found in any creature.)

To
take words spoken in highest Heaven describing the spiritual love manifested in
the Virgin Mary and put them in the mouth of Troilus at the moment he achieves
sexual union with Criseyde might be considered a gross

403

breach of literary decorum. J. A. W.
Bennett (Boitani 1983 93-4) quotes J. A. Symonds and J. H. Whitfield before
making his own comments on how Boccaccio used echoes of Dante in indecorous,
inappropriate and inept ways. Symonds, he comments, even ventured to write that
Boccaccio ¡®was incapable of comprehending the real character of [Dante] the man
he deified.¡¯ Chaucer seems to be laying himself open to similar accusations of
a complete lack of decorum here. However, we might rather want to suggest with
Winthrop Wetherbee that these shocking lines form part of a deliberate, but
hidden strategy that culminates in the final lines of the poem, by which
Troilus¡¯s trajectory is deliberately and constantly contrasted ironically with
Dante¡¯s.

Winthrop
Wetherbee writes of the transfer of St. Bernard¡¯s address to the sexually
triumphant Troilus (Dante Encyclopedia 162): ¡®The barrier separating
human from divine love is for a moment virtually translucent, but the context
makes plain that Troilus is self-deceived and is destined in the end to be
betrayed by the ¡®grace¡¯ that seems to inform his experience.¡¯ It is hard to believe
that Chaucer was unaware of the ironic patterning he was introducing into his
poem by these intertextual moments, yet they are never identified as such. He
knew he was using words from Dante; he knew where the words came from; we
should not doubt that he knew exactly why he was using them as he did.

Finally, one of
the stanzas in Troilus that most clearly contains Dantean echoes is
found near the end of Book 5, as he is preparing to conclude the tale of
Troilus with a brief account of his death and momentary ascension:

Go, litel book, go litel myn tragedie,

Ther God
thy maker yet, er that he dye,

So sende
might to make in som comedie!

But litel
book, no making thou nenvye,

1790But subgit be to alle poesye;

And kis
the steppes, wheras thou seest pace

404

Virgile,
Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.

Commentators
often point out that the first recorded uses in English of the word ¡®tragedy¡¯
occur in Chaucer¡¯s translation of Fortune¡¯s rhetorical question in Boethius (Boece
Book 2, Prosa 2): ¡®What other thynge bywaylen the cryinges of tragedyes but
oonly the dedes of Fortune, that with an unwar strook overturneth the realmes
of greet nobleye? (Glose. Tragedye is to seyn a dite of a prosperite for a
time, that endeth in wrecchidnesse).¡¯ Chaucer also used the word with a
similar meaning in the opening lines of the Monk¡¯s Tale (1991-4):

I wol biwaille, in manere of
tragedie,

The harm of hem that stoode
in heigh degree,

And fillen so that ther nas
no remedie

To brynge hem out of hir
adversitee.

Readers naturally identify those uses of
the word with that found in this stanza, the only use of the word in Troilus.
Kelly (39-50) offers a helpful survey of the ways other writers of the age used
the word, stressing Chaucer¡¯s originality. In particular, in pages 50-51 he
stresses the significant absence from Boethius¡¯ definition, and from the glose
as formulated by Chaucer, of any notion of a moral fault serving as the cause
of the tragic disaster. Fortune, after all, wishes to stress the entirely
arbitrary nature of her operations, and so too does Chaucer.

It is not
correct to see the story of Troilus simply as a ¡®tragedy¡¯ in the De casibus
sense in which the word is defined and used in the Boece and the Monk¡¯s
Tale. More precisely, the ¡®dedes of Fortune¡¯ mentioned in both seem always
to involve the fall of powerful men from high positions of social, ¡®political¡¯
power (¡®the realmes of greet nobleye¡¯ or ¡®in heigh degree¡¯). This reflects
Dante¡¯s view of the role of Fortune, quoted above, in the fall of Troy. It
could be argued that there is no precedent before Chaucer for applying the word
¡®tragedy¡¯ to the story of a lover made unhappy by losing the woman he

405

loved to another man. It is surely
significant that this stanza is placed before the account of Troilus¡¯s death,
which is thus clearly marked off as being perhaps unrelated to the story of
Troilus¡¯s ¡®tragic¡¯ love for Criseyde. The connection between tragedy and
personal unhappiness derives, surely, from that same Book 2 of Boethius, where
Boethius is mainly focussing on his own loss of human happiness, but his loss
was political in nature and cause. Troilus, in that case, would be the first
tragic lover.

True, an
awareness of Chaucer¡¯s knowledge of Dante opens another possible interpretation
of the use of the word ¡®tragedie¡¯ in this stanza of Troilus. It could be
suggested that the rather unexpected ¡®litel¡¯ applied to the ¡®book¡¯ and to ¡®myn
tragedie¡¯ represents a self-deprecating, contrasting echo of the passage in the
Commedia (Inferno 20.113) where Virgil refers to the Aeneid
as L¡¯alta mia tragedia (my high tragedy), the only use of the word tragedia
in the whole Commedia and one of only a few instances in Dante¡¯s entire Opus.
Chaucer would then be claiming epic status for his poem by linking it through
Dante to Virgil.

Dante never
uses the word tragedia in the ¡®Boethian¡¯ sense of a story of a fall from
power (or happiness), but only to designate works written in the ¡®high,¡¯ most
elevated poetic style, although in such works the story itself may not be
specifically ¡®tragic¡¯ in the more modern sense, as can be seen in the quotation
from the Inferno, for the Aeneid does not tell a ¡®tragic story.¡¯
Indeed, Dante refers to the Canzone ¡®Donne, ch¡¯avete intelletto d¡¯amore¡¯
in Vita Nuova 19 as a model of ¡®tragic style¡¯ (DVE 12.3) yet this
poem is entirely a celebration of the love for Beatrice while she is still
alive on earth. It could then possibly be argued that Chaucer is here consciously
using the word in Dante¡¯s stylistic sense, rather than that, more familiar to
us today through the De casibus tradition, found in Chaucer¡¯s Boece,
and in the Monk¡¯s Tale. In the De vulgari eloquentia, which
virtually no one in the 14th century had heard of or read, Dante
wrote:

When dealing with the various subjects that are suitable for poetry,

406

we must know how to choose whether to treat them in tragic, comic,
or elegiac style. By 'tragic' I mean the higher style, by 'comic' the lower,
and by 'elegiac' that of the unhappy. If it seems appropriate to use the tragic
style, then the illustrious vernacular must be employed, and so you will need
to bind together a canzone. (2.4.6)

This passage shows that for Dante, the
¡®tragic style¡¯ merely corresponds to what otherwise might be termed the ¡®high¡¯
or even ¡®epic¡¯ style.

As regards the
sense in which Chaucer uses the word near the end of Troilus, Boitani
(1983 128) refuses to make a choice:

Tragedy it is because of Fortune¡¯s
operations and Troilus¡¯ death; unlike Dante¡¯s ¡®Comedy¡¯, it has what Dante would
call a ¡®foul and horrible¡¯ end. Stylistically it may be classed as a ¡®tragedy¡¯,
for it uses at appropriate points the ¡®high¡¯ style of Virgil¡¯s ¡®alta
tragedia¡¯.

He ought
perhaps to have considered more closely Chaucer¡¯s originality in writing his
¡®tragedy¡¯ as a story about loss of happiness, rather than a fall from power. In
the end, it almost seems as though Chaucer, in using the term ¡®tragedy,¡¯ was
deliberately doing what Dante had done in using the word ¡®commedia¡¯ for
his poem. The Dante Encyclopedia discusses the meaning of the title at
length (184-8) and underlines that ¡®There is no doubting the importance of the Commedia¡¯s
title as a means to understanding the poem; just as there is little doubt that Dante¡¯s
choice of ¡®comedia¡¯ is deeply problematic . . . . the title¡¯s very
idiosyncrasy is meant to be a spur to its interpretation.¡¯ In this context it
should be remembered that Dante¡¯s original title was simply ¡®Comedia¡¯
(given an additional ¡®m¡¯ in modern spellings) and that divina was only
added to the title by the editors of the 1555 edition. It seems that Dante was
strongly conscious of the importance of redefining such terminology in his
attempts to establish a quite new way of writing. Chaucer may have understood
that.

407

Windeatt (1992
133) points out that this stanza in Troilus is also the only place where
Chaucer uses the word ¡®poesye¡¯ and notes the coincidence that Dante, too, only
uses the word ¡®poesi¡¯ once (Purgatorio 1.7). The initial humility topos
of ¡®litel book¡¯ is sometimes contrasted (Windeatt 1992 306) with the apparent
presumption of Chaucer in putting his Troilus and himself on an equal
footing with the great works and writers of the past. To this it might be
replied that Chaucer is expressing a sense of literary tradition and fraternal
community as well as profound respect and veneration in the invitation to ¡®kiss
the steps¡¯ of the named writers. The list of what would today be seen as
¡®great¡¯ writers in the last line of that stanza should surely be read as a list
of ¡®ancient, defining authorities¡¯ of what ¡®poesye¡¯ means, since it is not sure
that today¡¯s notions of fame, status and prestige were current in Chaucer¡¯s
time.

So much can be
adduced from within the text. But reference to Dante shows that the list is in
fact a far richer line than a cursory reading might suggest. Dante was
intensely conscious of his own position as a poet within the great classical
literary tradition. He lists the recognized classical auctores in the Vita
Nuova 25.9 and in the DVE 2.6.7, when he is discussing the best that
the new, vernacular poetry can achieve, and its relationship to the classical
Latin canon. Still, it is in the Commedia that we find the most
significant correspondence to Chaucer¡¯s line, in a passage that Chaucer was
surely recalling. In Inferno 4.85ff Dante¡¯s journey with Virgil as his
guide has hardly begun when they enter Limbo, the place of those who cannot
enter Heaven since they died before the completion of Christ¡¯s redemption and
knew nothing of the Christian faith. There, they encounter the spirits of four
of the great figures of classical antiquity in poetry and philosophy, wrapped
in light amidst the darkness. The highest poets, masters of the various styles,
are named: Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan; in the midst of sorrow there are smiles
of greeting and the six poets discuss their craft in words so sublime that
Dante says he will not report them.

Dante expects
the reader to notice that Terence, the great writer of

408

comedies, is
absent from the list in which he traditionally figures; here it is Dante
himself, author of this very different kind of Christian comedy, who is the
sixth figure (Dante Encyclopedia 180-1). In his note to this canto,
Sinclair (Inferno page 70) stresses that poetry ¡®is the utterance in
terms of the imagination of truth which cannot otherwise be known or told and
its functions are the loftiest of all that belongs to human speech; ¡®For Dante
and his contemporaries, poetry was wisdom¡¯ (V. Rosi), and he pleads
here, partly for himself, but far more for poetry.¡¯ Beyond this echo of a most
significant image of what was above termed the ¡®community of poets,¡¯ Windeatt
(1984 557) also notes a reference to Purgatorio 21 130. Here we find a
key to the inclusion in Chaucer¡¯s list of Statius. Dante has imagined this
surely pagan poet to have been converted to Christianity; he is therefore
located away from the other, non-Christian poets in their Limbo. His place is
high up in Purgatory, and he is ready to rise (together with Dante) to Paradise
later in the poem. For Dante, Statius¡¯s Thebaid displays at certain
moments ¡®an embryonic spirituality¡¯ that sanctioned his promotion to an almost
doctoral role; Dante gives him the task of explaining ¡®how the powers of the
natural organism are transformed and reoriented when informed by divine vertù¡¯
(Wetherbee 1998 252).The Thebaid as such, with its darkness and
violence, fades away into insignificance. Wetherbeeargues:

It is by an
essentially similar shift of perspective that the heroic and even the ¡®Dantean¡¯
dimensions of the experience of Chaucer¡¯s Troilus are finally revealed as
devoid of meaning, save insofar as their articulation has been a necessary
catalyst for the narrator¡¯s progress, through poetry, to that spiritual
perspective from which Troilus and his world, like Statian Thebes, will
suddenly become all but invisible. Chaucer goes beyond Dante to show us the
actual stages of the narrator¡¯s rejection of his story, punctuated by the
invective that reduces the hero¡¯s love and bravery to worldly folly and subject
his pagan beliefs to a virtual exorcism.

409

In the closing
lines (12: 817-8) of his Thebaid, Statius had addressed his poem
directly, as Chaucer does his:

uiue, precor;
nec tu diuinam Aeneida tempta,

sed longe sequere
et uestigia semper adora.

(Live, I pray.
Do not seek to rival the divine Aeneid

but follow from
afar and ever venerate its footsteps)

Dante, writing the scene of the meeting
with Statius in the Purgatorio, surely recalled those lines. Statius tells
him how much he owed to the Aeneid and how he wishes he had lived at the
time of Virgil. He naturally cannot recognize the shade of Virgil standing
beside them, since they never met, but Dante cannot help smiling at the irony
of the moment and, questioned by Statius, identifies Virgil. Statius at once
bends to kiss the feet of Virgil, who stops him.

Chaucer, in
writing the words ¡®kis the steppes,¡¯ was presumably conscious of these two,
quite distinct moments in Dante¡¯s Commedia, and perhaps also of the
words from Statius that probably suggested the Purgatorio scene to
Dante. His ¡®no making thee no envie¡¯ might equally be thought to derive from
Statius¡¯s ¡®tempta.¡¯ More, though, it must suggest a realization that, just as
Dante places himself as the humble sixth in the company of Great Ancient Poets,
so too Chaucer is here placing himself and his little tragedy as a humble
sixth.

All these
moments are concerned with community and indebtedness within the poetic
tradition. With that comes an awareness that Chaucer¡¯s use of the word ¡®poesye¡¯
is likewise fraught with meaning. As Windeatt remarks (1992 132-3), Dante and
Petrarch are the only ¡®modern¡¯ writers whom Chaucer ever calls ¡®poet¡¯ (though
neither is named in the Troilus) and they, together with Boccaccio, whom
he never names anywhere, are his main modern

410

references in Troilus. The mere
mention of the word ¡®poesye¡¯ in that context should make the reader alert to
Chaucer¡¯s hidden reference here to the parallel theme of the nature of modern,
vernacular poetry, expressed in Dante¡¯s Convivio and De vulgari
eloquentia, evoked by Windeatt (1992 133). Yet nothing in Chaucer¡¯s text
expressly indicates such multiple dimensions and it is indeed very unlikely
that any of his 14th-century English readers could have been aware
of them.

Likewise, it
may be wondered what Chaucer¡¯s initial audience made of his stated wish at this
point to ¡®make in som comedie.¡¯ It is possible to find critics who see in this
a reference to plans for the Canterbury Tales (Boitani 1983 128) but
Windeatt (1992 132) identifies the ¡®comedie¡¯ with what follows directly,
the rise of Troilus¡¯s soul to the Eighth Sphere after his death; the ¡®litel
myn tragedye,¡¯ containing the story of Troilus¡¯s passionate union with
Criseyde, has been sent on its way, what remains is comedy. The narrator of
this ardent love story seems to want to publish it in an unfinished form. He
presents the story of Trolius¡¯s unhappy love as a ¡®tragedy¡¯ complete in itself,
without any mention of his death and the final closure of the poem. The next
stanza seems equally final, concerned only with the technicalities of copying
the finished book accurately.

All
commentators have noted the laconic way in which Troilus is finally killed,
after all this, within two lines (V, 1805-6), and by Achilles, who has no
relationship with the love affair. The choice of Achilles as the agent of
Troilus¡¯s death takes readers back to the death of Hector (V, 1555-61), who was
likewise killed by Achilles; Chaucer encourages this reference by mentioning
Hector in line V, 1804. The heroic death of Hector comes immediately after the
stanza mentioned previously, where the fall of Troy is attributed to Fortune.
Immediately prior to that, Cassandra had interpreted Troilus¡¯s dream of the boar
by telling the entire story of the Thebaid before concluding that
Diomede has taken Criseyde from him. Although he cannot believe her because she
is telling the truth, her words combine with the death of Hector to plunge
Troilus into what is effectively a ¡®double sorrow¡¯ in

411

which he longs for death.

Readers today
know through scholarly footnotes, although Chaucer naturally makes no mention
of the fact, that the incident of Troilus¡¯s ascent after his death does not
figure in Boccaccio¡¯s Filostrato but is transferred by Chaucer from his Teseida,
where it happens to Arcita. Boccaccio was almost certainly inspired there by
the ascent of Dante with Beatrice from Purgatory at the start of the Paradiso.
It might be possible to suggest that Chaucer¡¯s word ¡®comedie¡¯ applied to
the episode constitutes a verbal wink, indicating that he has recognized the
parallel with the Commedia and hopes a few good readers may do likewise.

Probably
nothing in Chaucer¡¯s Troilus troubles and challenges modern readers so
much as what is said in the four stanzas following Troilus¡¯s ascent and vision;
the first is a series of reductive, dismissive exclamations: ¡®Swich fyn hath,
lo, this Troilus for love;¡¯ the second addresses a group of potential
contemporary readers in moralizing tones: ¡®O yonge fresshe folkes, he or she, /
In which that love up groweth with your age, / Repeyreth hoom from worldly
vanitee;¡¯ the third continues the exhortation to live sincerely Christian lives
that began in the previous stanza; the fourth returns with greater explicitness
to the rejection of the pagan world implied in the first:

Lo here, of Payens corsed olde rytes,

1850Lo here, what alle hir goddes may
availle;

Lo here,
these wrecched worldes appetytes;

Lo here,
the fyn and guerdon for travaille

Of Iove,
Appollo, of Mars, of swich rascaille!

One reason for
modern surprise and even disappointment must be the contrast between these
lines and the seemingly positive, sympathetic tone in which the narrator has
hitherto told his tale. This corresponds to the positive response to sexual
expressions of ¡®romantic¡¯ love that passes for normal in today¡¯s world, and a
dislike for any indication that salvation might not

412

automatically be open to everyone. It seems
to such permissive readers that whoever has been responsible for the narrative
up to this point has done an abrupt about-turn in order to end on an
irreconcilably different, orthodox Christian, even puritan key. These stanzas
are sometimes seen as an aesthetic blemish, a failure to preserve the unity of
the work to the end.

In the light of
what has been seen in the preceding pages, another, quite different reading of Troilus
might be (and has indeed been) proposed, one which sees these concluding
stanzas as integral to a full understanding of the poem. It would begin with
the invocation of Tisiphone in the opening stanza, and relate the entire course
of the action of Chaucer¡¯s poem to the role of the references to Statius, the
pagan and Christian literary traditions, and the nature of love in Dante¡¯s Commedia.
That is the principle focus of Wetherbee¡¯s 1998 essay.

Essentially, he
says, we are sent back by the ending to reexamine our reading of the poem as a
whole, and particularly its moral status as a love story. We now notice that
the hymn of joy that Troilus utters as he lies in bed with Criseyde,
(3.1254-74) which includes the words of Dante¡¯s St. Bernard already noted,
begins with the double exclamation ¡®O Love! O Charite!¡¯ Now these are regular
Christian names for God but the very next line shows that Troilus is blessing
Eros, not the Christian God of whom he can of course know nothing, for he
includes ¡®Thi moder ek, Citheria the swete¡¯ in his praises. For him, erotic,
physical love is God and the highest bliss. From a Christian perspective, he is
wrong about everything important: the nature of love, the nature of bliss, and
the identity of God.

A few lines
later, still in sexual ecstasy, he will tell Pandarus, ¡®Thow hast in hevene
ybrought my soule at reste (III, 1599). To this, only a few lines later,
Pandarus responds with a truly wise warning of the mutability of all earthly
joys: ¡®For of fortunes sharpe adversitee / The worste kynde of infortune is
this, / A man to han ben in prosperitee, / And it remembren whan it passed is.¡¯
(III, 1625-8) Troilus takes no notice of this essential truth, which echoes
lines in Chaucer¡¯s Boece: ¡®For in alle adversities of fortune the most

413

unzeely kynde of contrarious fortune is to
han ben weleful¡¯ (II, pr. 4 noted by Windeatt 1984, 331). Windeatt, designating
the notion ¡®proverbial,¡¯ notes another possible parallel, quoting lines from
Dante Inferno V: ¡®nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo
felice / nella miseria¡¯ (V, 121-3) (there is no greater pain than to recall the
happy time in misery). The full significance of this Dantean parallel can only
be sensed if we recall that those are the words of Francesca, who tells how she
committed adultery with her husband¡¯s brother after reading with him about
Lancelot and Guinevere¡¯s first kiss. That moment of physical passion and
¡®bliss¡¯ has brought them to everlasting torment. Troilus, we might begin to
suspect, is blinded by folly; he believes that he has reached ¡®rest¡¯ and
permanence when he has in fact only reached the midpoint of his story (Kaylor).
The readers may recall better than the narrator that what follows is the
movement ¡®out of joie,¡¯ (I, 4) announced in the very first stanza of the poem.

Once that
movement is complete, Troilus dies as a heroic warrior, not as a lover, and is
granted his final moment of insight into the truth of the matter. Here he is
out of joy indeed. Looking down from the inner surface of the eighth sphere,
high indeed, but not as high as God in heaven, he ¡®fully gan despyse / This
wrecched world, held al vanitee / To respect of the pleyn felicitee / That is
in hevene above¡¯ (V, 1814-7) but that Heaven with its true felicity is not for
him. Then ¡®Ther he was slayn, his loking doun he caste; / And in him-self he
lough right at the wo / Of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste,¡¯ (V, 1820-2)
which is not a very positive response to the expressions of human affection and
friendship common in heroic poetry. At last he admits his moral failure as a
too physical lover: ¡®¡°And dampned al our werk that folweth so / The blinde
lust, the which that may not laste, / And sholden al our herte on hevene caste¡¯
(V, 1823-5). But such a glimpse of Christian and moral truth can have no
redemptive effect on him now, for what is represented in these lines is not
some kind of apotheosis or special grace, but Troilus¡¯s ¡®Particular Judgement.¡¯

Catholic
doctrine teaches that each human soul without exception,

414

Christian or not, receives knowledge of its
eternal destiny at the moment of death. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia says:
¡®Theologians suppose that the particular judgment will be instantaneous, that
in the moment of death the separated soul is internally illuminated as to its
own guilt or innocence and of its own initiation takes its course either to
hell, or to purgatory, or to heaven.¡¯ There may be a double irony in the
location of Troilus¡¯ final moment of insight. The seventh heaven is that of
Saturn, the last of the planets, of whose character the Knight¡¯s Tale
paints an appalling picture (2454-69). Rising to the sphere of Saturn is for
Troilus a brief experience of the full scope of ¡®the erratik sterres¡¯ (V,
1812), the planets that influence humanity by their constant changes. Above him
lie only the unmoving sphere of the fixed stars and the Empyrean, beyond which
lies the Christian Heaven, not a place but the eternal ¡®mind¡¯ of God.

The judgement
is not only for Troilus. The narrator who has so long sided with him must share
in it, and the readers too. From the height of the sphere of Saturn the soul of
Troilus must be imagined to make an abrupt fall, to the sphere lying
immediately above that of the moon, for the text says it is Mercury who is to
take him away to where he must go, to Limbo, as one who lived before the coming
of Christ. In the eighth sphere, too, there is no resting place for Troilus.
The delightful tale of romantic love¡¯s joys and pains has suddenly been
denounced as ¡®blinde lust.¡¯ Naturally, the narrator speaks with a radically
changed, repentant voice the denunciatory stanzas that follow.

As Wetherbee
stresses, ¡®the story adumbrated in the opening stanzas of the Troilus—the
story, ultimately, of Troilus¡¯s double sorrow for love of a Criseyde who
¡®forsook hym er she deyde¡¯ (1.56)—conforms in its prevailing emphases to the
representation of human love in canto 5 of Dante¡¯s Inferno, the canto of
Dido, Francesca, and all the ¡®donne antiche e¡¯cavalieri¡¯ whose love proved
stronger than reason¡¯ (1998, 250-1). In view of what we have so far seen, it
seems almost unthinkable that Chaucer did not realize the parallel and difference
between his own way of telling the story of Troilus and Dante¡¯s response to the
tale of Paolo and Francesca. Never explicitly mentioned,

415

Chaucer¡¯s awareness of this parallel is
perhaps revealed in the lines from Purgatorio echoed in Pandarus¡¯s words
quoted above: ¡®nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella
miseria¡¯ (V, 121-3 (there is no greater pain than to recall the happy time in
misery). For these are the words by which Francesca begins her account of her
sexual encounter with Paolo. We cannot fail to note that she says she ¡®diro
come colui che piange e dice¡¯ (V, 126) (will tell as one who weeps and tells)
which might perhaps underlie the last line of Chaucer¡¯s poem¡¯s first stanza:
¡®for t'endite / These woful vers, that wepen as I write.¡¯

Chaucer¡¯s
narrator weeps, surely, out of pity for the human condition in which love can
be experienced at the same time as both the highest bliss and utter vanity, indeed
a cause of damnation. His tears could be seen, Wetherbee suggests, as
¡®something closer to true charity than Dante¡¯s self-regarding pity¡¯ (1998 250).
Francesca recalls how she and Paolo, both married adults, were brought to
commit adultery while reading a romance about Lancelot. She tells, her
companion weeps, and Dante falls unconscious in one of the most emotional
moments of his entire journey: ¡®si che di pietade / io vienni men cosi com¡¯io
morisse; / e caddi come corpo morto cade¡¯ (Inferno V, 140-2) (While the
one spirit said this the other wept so that for pity I swooned as if in death
and dropped like a dead body). While telling the story of the union of Troilus
and Criseyde, Chaucer¡¯s narrator maintains his distance. Arriving at the end of
his task, he is brought back to the emotions indicated in the opening lines of
the poem, and to a fuller understanding of where such a passion must lead.

The complexity
of Chaucer¡¯s debt to Dante in Troilus is nowhere clearer than in the
words that close the poem (V, 1863-9):

Thou
oon, and two, and three, eterne on-lyve,

That
regnest ay in three and two and oon,

1865Uncircumscript, and al mayst
circumscryve,

Us from
visible and invisible foon

416

Defende;
and to thy mercy, everichoon,

So make
us, Iesus, for thy grace digne,

For love
of mayde and moder thyn benigne! Amen.

The stanza owes
nothing to Boccaccio. The first three lines are a close translation of words
from Dante¡¯s Commedia (Paradiso 14.28-30) while Boitani (1983,
127) links the final line with the opening line of Paradiso 30. The lines
celebrating the Trinity are taken from Canto 14 of Paradiso, which is
set in the Sphere of the Sun, which Dante entered in Canto 10, and the singers
are the spirits encountered in the first two circles of the wise. Eighth among
the wise doctors forming the First Circle introduced by Beatrice in Canto 10 is
¡®the holy soul who makes plain the world¡¯s deceitfulness to one that hears him
rightly; the body from which he was driven lies below in Cieldauro, and he came
from martyrdom and exile to this peace.¡¯ Did Chaucer realize that this meant
that one of the voices joining in this hymn is none other than that of his
favorite philosopher, Boethius? Given the difficulty of the reference, we might
wonder. Yet, in order to attain such a full understanding of the Commedia as
we have been suggesting, Chaucer must have been introduced to Dante¡¯s work by
someone with a very deep knowledge of it during his visit to Italy. They may
have helped him here. It is certainly a fitting final, hidden link to a
Boethius already dear to Chaucer but now made more significant by the role
assigned to him by Dante, as he dances in eternal bliss above, so very unlike
Troilus.

Sogang University

417

Works Cited

Primary sources

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri with translation and comment by John D. Sinclair. 3 Volumes.
London: John Lane The Bodley Head. 1946.

Scholars have identified over 30 points in Troilus
and Criseyde where Chaucer is clearly translating directly from Dante¡¯s Commedia.
Yet he never indicates his debt or refers to Dante explicitly. The echoes of
Dante¡¯s text are particularly dense in the poem¡¯s opening lines in Book 1, at the
moment in Book 3 when Troilus and Criseyde acheive physical union, and above
all in the closing section of Book 5. Close examination of these sections
suggests that Chaucer was pursuing a deliberate, but hidden strategy that
culminates in the final lines of the poem, by which Troilus¡¯s trajectory is
deliberately and constantly contrasted ironically with Dante¡¯s. While Troilus
and the poem¡¯s narratorial voice identify the sexual union of Book 3 with
achieved bliss, the Dantean references and Boethian elements invite a quite
different reading. The references to Statius in Chaucer¡¯s poem, in particular,
cannot be fully understood without reference to the role he plays in Dante¡¯s Commedia,
as the archetype of the Christian poet confronting his religious and moral
responsibilities in a pagan literary tradition. A brief survey of the echoes of
Boethius¡¯ Consolation in Troilus shows a similar strategy of
indirect, ironic commentary on Troilus¡¯ notions of happiness.